


Seasons

by reysrose



Series: Fire and Grave Dirt [3]
Category: The 100 (TV)
Genre: 100 Things 'Verse, Baby commander Madi, Becho, Canon Overhaul, Eden survives, F/F, Gunshot Wounds, Healing, Memori - Freeform, No Space, No new planet, Octavia and Diyoza become bros, Post-Episode: s05e13 Damocles Part 2, Princess Mechanic, niytavia
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-10-23
Updated: 2018-12-23
Packaged: 2019-08-06 04:25:28
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,834
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16381349
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/reysrose/pseuds/reysrose
Summary: In the first attack against Eligius, Octavia is shot but doesn't realize it. The valley is not destroyed, and the prisoners and Wonkru agree to share Eden.How do you adjust to peace when your entire life has been a war?





	1. Summer, Part 1

She doesn’t notice something is wrong until she tries to stand after kneeling before Madi. There’s a sharp pain, lancing through her middle next to her old scar. She reaches for it, thinking it’s the bubbled scar tissue that shoots through her body and aches when it’s tired, staggering lopsidedly through the crowd to find Niylah. She presses her palm down, stumbling, tired feet digging in the sand. Her head feels light. She must be concussed. 

There’s something wet beginning to slick her palm, drip off her fingers where they clutch at her old wound. Octavia tugs her hand away, faintly curious. The stars swirl and shift in the sky above her head.

“Blodreina?”

She waves them off. Is it raining? She brings her hand up to her face, squinting at in in the dim torch light.

“Blodreina.”

Her fingers are red. Octavia feels her knees buckle out from under her, body swaying and then collapsing onto the ground. Her fingers reach for something to latch onto, but all she finds are grains of sand. They creep under her jagged nails, slide into her hair and her collar.

“Blodreina!” 

She rolls herself onto her side, clutching at the spot of pain. Someone reaches for her, to help her up, but she doesn’t let them touch her. Those around her are panicked, murmuring to themselves, edging closer to her as if to drag her upright. She makes it to her knees, slumping forward for a brief second, both palms rooted against the sand. 

“O. O!”

“Don’t touch me-” 

Her brother ignores her, looping an arm around her back and hauling her up like she weighs nothing. She stumbles out of his grip, anger and pain mixing together in her shattered brain. 

“I said don’t touch me!” 

It’s getting harder to see, to think, to breathe. She needs to make it to Niylah before she collapses again, because Madi may be the commander, but Octavia has led these people for 6 years without showing weakness. She can’t afford to start now. She chokes on a shuddering breath, swaying where she stands. 

“Where’s the med tent?”  
She barely makes it, tugging aside the flap of the tent Niylah and Jackson are holed up in before her knees buckle and she falls, hard, onto her injured side with a horrible sound. 

“Baby, baby- Jackson, there’s blood.” 

Niylah is sweaty, stained with blood that isn’t hers, and her hair is tumbling out of her braid. She’s beautiful, alive, and beautiful. Octavia manages to drag herself to sitting and slump against Niylah’s chest, head over her heart. She tries to ignore the pain of her clothes being cut at the seams by a careful, slow moving Jackson and peeled away from her wound, burying her face in Niylah’s grimy chest. A hand presses against the spot on her back that throbs and aches and she screams, voice cracking when pressure is applied to her front. Niylah is rocking her, stroking the hair out of her face with one hand. 

“I don’t know how you fight with it down like this, Okteivia.”

She snorts despite herself, despite the horrible pain that’s spreading up into her chest and neck and down into her hips. Niylah is warm, her scent comforting beneath layers of sweat and sand. 

“ ‘Tavia?” 

Miller. His hands are larger than Niylah’s when they cup her cheeks, forcing her to look at him. He looks tired, mouth drawn tight with pain, and one of his arms is stiff where it’s extended. She turns away, leaning into his other hand. 

“Help hold her down, Nate. This is going to hurt.”

All three of them reposition her as shock continues to fall like a veil over her body. The pain is numbing somewhat, and she lets her head roll across the jacket it’s on. Miller gives her a tight smile, his bad arm curled into his chest and his good arm across her hips. She grins back, lopsided, tongue clumsy behind her teeth.

“Deep breath in, Octavia. Good, hold it. Ready?”

She nods. She has no idea what’s going on, but she can follow directions. She’s good at that. 

“Okay, start to blow it out, slowly. Three, two, one-”

She howls, bucking against the hands holding her down, as the knife bubbles against her bloody flesh. She hasn’t had a wound cauterized in years, and she forgot the specific agony of it. The knife is lifted off her belly but the burning sensation remains and she sobs, tears dripping down her face. She wishes for unconsciousness, moaning when she’s turned onto her stomach. 

“One more, Octavia. You’re doing really well, but I need you to focus really hard on staying awake. You’ve lost a lot of blood, and we can’t give you a transfusion right now. Another deep breath, sweetheart.” 

It hurts, and she gasps on the breath, turning her head and biting down on the sleeve of the jacket. Niylah reaches down, stroking Octavia’s cheek. 

“Once this is done, we’ll warm you up, yeah?”

She nods tiredly. Niylah squeezes her cheek, then her arm, and then her back is on fire. She begs them to stop, writhing against the hands holding her on the ground. Her vision is spotting out, head spinning. Someone binds her stomach tight, and she sobs. 

“The knife is gone, O. It’s gone, you’re ok, you made it-”

She scrabbles for Niylah, dragging herself into her lap with a low vibrating moan of pain. She has to stay awake. She has to, Jackson said so. She drapes a heavy arm around Niylah’s neck, burying her face into the soft skin there and breathing deep, trying to will the horrible sick feeling away. 

“Hey. Drink this.”

Miller is there when she tugs her face out of Niylah’s neck, head drooping down before she can force it up. She holds out a shaking hand for the canteen, but Miller shakes his head and presses the rim to her lips, making her drink at his pace. The water is out before she’s ready to be finished, and she lets her head fall back onto Niylah’s chest, deep breaths in and out of her abused lungs and raw throat. She gives herself ten minutes, her girlfriend rocking her gently as the pain becomes manageable. 

She folds her legs under her, dragging herself to standing. She sways, doubling over to clutch at her injured stomach as Niylah leaps up and steadies her.

“You need to rest.”

Octavia snarls, jerking away from Niylah’s hands. A look of hurt flashes across her face, and Octavia wants to apologize, to hold her and kiss her, but plans need to be made. 

“Either you stay, or come with me. But we’re still fighting a war, one that’s now being led by a 13 year old girl, and I’m not sitting it out.”

She doesn’t expect Niylah to take her hand, wrap an arm around her side to support her, and lead her from the tent. She grins, limping forward, pressing the curve of her mouth to Niylah’s cheek. 

“Thank you.” 

“You’re a stubborn pain in my ass,” Niylah murmurs, helping her through the tent flap. But she kisses Octavia’s head, the hand in her shirt tugging on the fabric. 

~  
The journey towards the valley is agony. She’d forced Niylah to stay behind, to wait until they were sure it was safe, and she’s on her own, stumbling occasionally as she trails Madi. Her brother comes up behind her, and she doesn’t look at him, just keeps walking. Her head spins a little harder, and she staggers, listing to the side. Her brother grabs her arm to tug her upright and she jerks away.

“You should have stayed at the camp, O.”

“Fuck you.”

She’s going to be sick. She’s going to throw up, right there in the sand, right in front of her brother and the remainder of her people. She presses a hand to her forehead and forces herself forwards, dizzy. 

“O, stop. You need to rest, or drink something. You look like you’re going to collapse.”

“Fuck. You.”

Her head is pounding, and she doubles over, hitting her hands and knees and dragging herself forwards. She pukes, barely avoiding a face plant in the mess as her brother catches her around the middle and lifts her up and into his arms.

“Put me down, Bell…”

She’s out of strength. Her head falls back onto his shoulder, the world spinning.

“S’fine...”

She’s in and out after that, she thinks. Maybe. Bellamy shakes her awake, setting her on her feet as she stumbles to regain her balance in the sand.

“We’re almost there. You gotta fight, O. I can cover you, but you have to fight.”

She nods, staggering. Her brother grabs her arm and forces a canteen into her hand.

“You have to drink this, and keep it down. You lost a lot of blood.”

She gulps it down, almost immediately gagging violently as the water pools in her upset stomach. Bellamy grabs her, shoves a hand over her mouth, and forces her to swallow and take deep breaths through her nose until her stomach stops clenching. She grits her teeth when he lets go, irritated at the pain and weakness and her brother for touching her. 

“I’ll be fine, Bell.”

She’s not. An army meets them in the gorge, snipers on the ridges above them, rows of men in front of them. The only way out is through. Madi shouts the command to charge and she takes off, but only a few feet before bullets strafe the ground in front of her. She rears back, pressing her back against a wall.

“Octavia! You okay?”

“Fine!”

Miller shouts across the carnage to her again, clutching his gun.

“We need to take out the snipers! Can you handle that?”

She nods, darting towards him across the bottleneck they’re trapped in. She caves in on herself against the wall, gripping her belly with a strangled moan of pain. Miller hauls her up by the collar, shoving his canteen at her. 

“Come on. Don’t check out on me yet, samurai girl.”

She smiles, lifting the canteen to her mouth with shaking hands as she thinks to that first fight, that first moment with a sword in her hand. Miller cups her cheek, looks at her hard.

“You with me?”

“I’m with you.”

They sneak around the back, clipping along as fast as they can with Miller’s bad arm and her gut wound, guns pressed to their chests. Her sword hangs heavy, familiar against her hip, and she rolls through the soles of her stiff boots, careful not to be heard. The first pillbox is ahead of them, and she waves Miller around the back of it, through the trees, and presses up against an obstacle. 

She takes in another deep breath, holds it in. 

Three, two, one-

All four men in the box are dead before they see who attacks them. She almost collapses with the final body, but Miller hauls her up before she can. She blinks spots out of her vision, only for more to appear. 

“Stay with me, Octavia.” 

She’s cold. Miller is lowering her to the group, and it feels so much like Bellamy after he poisoned her that she can’t help the silent tears escaping her fluttering eyes. 

“Stay awake. Come on, O.” 

She coughs, gagging on the metal taste on her tongue, and spits out the blood that bubbles up her throat. 

“Shit,” she mumbles, reaching for Miller’s scruffy face to ground herself to reality. She can hear him on the radio, near frantic, as he half drags her into the pillbox and up against the wall. Her head lolls to the side, onto his shoulder. 

“Hey, hey- you’ve got bleeding internally, now you really have to stay awake.” 

She grimaces, spluttering as another wave of blood rushes up from her lung. 

“Yuck.” 

“Yeah, yuck. Eyes open. Jackson, she’s-”

And that’s all that she hears before her world goes entirely dark.

~

“Hey.”

She blinks, her head aching. Her tongue sits in her mouth like a mound of sand and she wiggles it experimentally, to see if it moves. She blinks again. Niylah is looking down at her, smirking a little, pressing something cold to her face. Octavia smiles dopily back. Whatever painkiller or sedative they have her on, it’s the good shit. 

“Drink.” 

She opens her mouth for fluid, then chokes on the water coming out of the straw. Niylah tuts, taking the cup away. No. She’s so thirsty. 

“Here.” 

The ice chips don’t make her choke. Her eyes feel sleepy and heavy, even as Niylah props her up against pillows and begins to undo something around her middle.

“You’re in bad shape, but awake is good, baby.” 

Octavia looks down at her belly and gags, her breathing speeding up when she focuses on the bottom of a line of dark stitches down from her chest and the deep bruising. Niylah plants a kiss on her head.

“B-bad.” 

“It looks pretty nasty, Okteivia, but you’re in one piece on the inside.” 

“Go-good holy sh-shit.” 

Niylah rubs a cream over her stitches that stings a little. Octavia rolls her head across her pillow to stare at the IV in her hand. There’s blood coming through it, and she wrinkles her nose. She hates transfusions. They feel funny to her brain. 

“Someone’s insides are my insides now.”

Niylah looks up from her bandaging and raises an eyebrow. 

“Hmmm?”

She gestures vaguely towards the IV. 

“The blood?”

She nods. Niylah pats the gauze on her torso, reaching up to inject something into her cannula. 

“Good stuff.”

“Morphine.” 

Niylah chuckles, tugging her chair closer to the cot and squeezing her hand. 

“I love you, strikon.”  
“Love you too.” 

The pain meds are taking over her brain, dragging her back to quiet darkness. 

Niylah holds her hand the whole time.


	2. Chapter 2

She doesn’t expect people to visit her. Miller sleeps next to her in a chair most nights, his head leaning against the wall. When she’s awake it makes her laugh seeing him like that, the morphine buzzing in her brain. Niylah, of course, spends all her downtime with her, and Jackson comes over to her cot every morning to drop a kiss on her forehead and check her vitals and blood work. The people that love her are there, almost all the time, but she’s not expecting anybody but those three to even consider coming to see her, which is why, when Murphy and Raven come in and sit in Miller and Niylah’s empty spots, she tells them to go away. 

“Get out,” she mumbles, barely looking up from the book she’s attempting to muddle through in her sleepy, drugged brain. They don’t move. 

“Nice to see you too, Pocahontas.” 

Octavia tenses. She doesn’t know why they’re there, and she doesn’t want to get her hopes up. Bellamy will have told them about Blodreina, and they’ll know everything, and they’ll hate her just like her brother does. He hasn’t even checked in to see if she’s alive. 

“What do you want?”

Murphy scoffs, propping his feet up on the end of her cot and forcing her to look at him. She glares, or at least thinks she glares, her eyes a little out of focus from the morphine. 

“Just saying hi. Glad you’re not dead.”

“You should want me dead.”

She doesn’t know why she says it, it just slips out. She rolls her eyes and squeezes them shut, trying to ignore the urge to find a way to ground herself. Deep breath in, deep breath out. They’re both still there when she opens her eyes, Raven’s hand hovering like she wants to touch her. Octavia looks back down at her book.

“I mean, I don’t know about Reyes, but I’m pretty stoked you didn’t die.” 

Octavia rolls her eyes, wincing when her breath gets caught in her chest. She coughs before she can swallow it, grimacing at the pain in her lung. Her mouth tastes metallic- she’s been coughing up clots and scabs from the puncture wound since she woke up. Raven looks nervous, hovering in her chair as she hacks, tearing up from the force and the pain. When it’s done, Murphy passes her the cup of water on her nightstand silently. Her hand shakes when she grabs it and it slips through her fingers, getting all over her shirt and blankets. Raven tenses and goes to help her but Octavia slaps at her reaching hands, turning her head away. 

“Go get Niylah, please.”  
“Octavia, let us help-”

“No.”

She keeps her head tilted down, staring at the damp evidence of her own weakness, until she hears two chairs scrape back and feels Niylah’s gentle, familiar callouses against the base of her neck. 

She’s in the process of waking up from one of her long and not restful naps the next time Raven comes back, this time alone, making herself small and quiet next to the side of her bed. Octavia blinks her into focus, sniffling against the nasal cannula. Raven extends her hand. 

“Can I touch you, Octavia?”

Octavia. Not Osleya, not Blodreina, not O. Octavia. She nods, letting Raven weave her fingers through the strands of her messy hair. 

“You know, Clarke threatened to shoot me when I saw her for the first time in 6 years.” 

She snorts despite herself, groaning against the damp cough it draws from her. Raven smooths down the hair over the nape of her neck. Raven doesn’t say anything else for a while, just playing with her hair as Octavia finishes waking up. She rolls onto her side with labored breathing, blinking at Raven dazedly. 

“Thirsty.”

“Here.”

She doesn’t drop the cup this time, but her hands are still trembling. 

“You know you’re safe now, right? Because you are, Octavia.” 

She shakes her head. But she doesn’t push Raven away, and she doesn’t lash out. She lays there, blinking slower and slower, her body not ready to wake up, as Raven puts tiny braids in her hair. 

Jackson starts making her take daily walks to get her lung working better. She hates them, grumbling every time Miller comes and hauls her to her feet. She’s too weak to walk unaided, and Miller keeps one arm around her waist and the other bracing her chest. Apparently they’d cracked her open to fix her. She’s too tired to really contemplate that. 

She’s shuffling in a slow circle around the little square, trying to avoid looking at anyone, her cheeks flaming red in humiliation. Miller splays his hand on her chest when she starts to wheeze a bit. 

“Slow down, yeah?” 

They keep taking slow, trembling steps. Clarke approaches them on their second lap, squeezing Miller’s shoulder. She’s been too sick and too hurt to really get in on the bonding and forgiveness between the last of the 100. She stares at a nearby tree aggressively. 

“How are you feeling?”

“Fine,” she snarls, still refusing to look at Clarke. She’s starting to get really sore, and a little lightheaded. She shifts her feet. 

“You look pretty good. I helped on the surgery, and you’re doing better than we expected after patching you up.” 

“Why are you talking to me? You hate me.” 

She starts to walk, forcing Miller to follow her so she doesn’t fall. She doesn’t miss the hurt look on Clarke’s pretty face as she staggers away. 

She starts running a fever overnight (nothing to worry about, says Abby, who looks very worried and also very uncomfortable) and spends the next two days in a haze of sleep and fever reducer. When she’s lucid, she think she hears Indra’s voice a few times. 

Raven is braiding her sweaty hair when Octavia asks about it, still feverish but awake enough to comprehend her surroundings.

“Rae?”

“Hmm?”

Octavia swallows and winces when Raven tugs a little too hard. 

“Was Indra here? When I was really sick the last couple of days?”

“Yeah. She was pretty worried about you.”

Something sparks in Octavia’s chest, but she doesn’t say anything, just lays there and lets Raven play with her hair. Her head throbs with her fever. Niylah sits down in the other chair, leaning over to kiss Octavia’s temple and then the corner of her mouth. 

“I see you’ve found a new person to sucker into braiding your hair, Okteivia.” 

She grins tiredly, fixing her eyes on her girlfriend and pouting until Niylah kisses her on the mouth. Raven rolls her eyes.

“You two are just as disgusting as Monty and Harper.”

Octavia feels her chest seize. Monty. She destroyed his farm. She tugs herself away from Raven’s gentle fingers and shoves her face into her pillow. She doesn’t move until she’s sure she’s alone, and even then she curls onto her side, tugs the blanket up over her head, and cries until her sore chest aches with a splitting pain. 

With recovery comes with a specific type of pain, the feeling of muscles and bones and skin knitting back together. She’s itchy, constantly, desperate to scratch at her stitches but not allowed. In a moment of uncharacteristic frustration, Niylah threatens to restrain her if she keeps trying to itch at them. They have a tense few hours after that. 

She wants to move. She wants to do things, dammit, and she’s bored stuck in her bed. 

“Miller?”

“Hmm?”

She props herself up on her elbows unaided, grimacing at the pain in her torso. Miller reaches for her, anxiously, but she takes another deep breath and stays steady without his help.

“I gotta get out of here.”

“You will when we take a walk.” 

She rolls her eyes, staying half up without a bed or pillows behind her back sapping her energy. She’s already breathing harder than she had been, and her left arm shakes and gives way.

“Ah!” 

Her body drops all the way back onto the cot and she loses the air in her lungs with a whining hiss of pain. Miller strokes a tendril of tangled hair from her cheek as she regains her breath, whimpering and writhing to escape the ache. 

“I gotta- I gotta-”

“Hey. Hey, hey. I heard you. You gotta get out of here.”

Tears sting her eyes and she sobs, turning her face from Miller’s calloused palm in embarrassment.

“Octavia, come on.”

“I-”

“The walks aren’t enough, are they?”

She shakes her head pathetically. She needs out. She feels claustrophobic stuck in this room, in this bed. Another sob breaks through her. Miller rubs her back gently, his hand practiced against her rigid spine.

“Okay, Octavia. Okay.”

Miller’s solution involves Murphy, who comes into her room for the first time since he watched her drop a cup of water down herself with a smirk and a coat, dropping it in her lap and grinning. She doesn’t look at him, gripping at the edge of the jacket instead. 

“What the fuck?”

“We are going out.”


End file.
